Ceri Radford is Assistant Comment Editor of the Telegraph.

What Bush and Mrs Blair read on their holiday

There has been some mirth recently over the choice of summer reading material from the powers that be.

No Dan Brown for this lady

Not content with the paperback thrillers favoured by mere mortals, Cherie Blair is powering her way through the 800-page history-fest Postwar, in a fearsome display of beach-side intellect.

Needless to say, she puts my holiday reading track record to shame, and according to our 'your view' debate on the subject I'm not alone. Other readers said they would rather take Book VII of Harry Potter, The Beach by Alex Garland or back copies of The Telegraph with themÂ….

But the question remains: even if I did want to take Postwar on holiday, would I get it through airport security?

George W Bush, meanwhile, has been absorbed in the more portable, though no less complexÂ tome The Outsider, by Albert Camus.

Bloggers and the left-leaning press have had a field day, trumpeting the irony that Dubya enjoyed a novel about a white man who is driven by inscrutable motives to murder an Arab, all written by a Frenchman and vehement atheist.

I won't even attempt to enter the fray, but will leave you with an extract from a spoof presidential reading diary that manages to poke fun both at Dubya and the more pretentious elements of continental intellectualism.

August 11: My anger at The New York Times subsides somewhat as I skim Foucault and Sartre. Surveillance serves its disciplinary function only if the populace is conscious of it. And if Americans aren't wrenched from being-pour-soi to being-en-soi (at least in relation to an observer who is Other) by the objectifying gaze of the state — well, then the terrorists have won.